Following the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Biden administration outlined peacekeeping requests similar to the demands of the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists.
When the Palestinian Hamas terror group demanded Israeli forces to remove themselves from the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Temple Mount, Jerusalem, tensions sparked between the two nations that resulted in a 10-day fight involving air and ground strikes that killed hundreds.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) crushed the Hamas militant group, killing some of its leaders, but not without casualties. The air and ground strikes destroyed homes and sent families seeking shelter. At the time, the United States was corresponding with Israeli leaders, calling for peace. But their requests were revealed to have mirrored that of the Hamas militant group.
According to The Blaze, Biden administration officials who were in talks with their Israeli counterparts to stop the fighting had three requests. In an Axios report, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called upon Israel's Meir Ben-Shabbat, the Adviser and Chief of Staff for National Security, to "stop the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, lower tensions on the Temple Mount and cancel the annual Jerusalem Day flag parade."
The Biden administration's demands were not met, however. Instead, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Supreme Court to postpone carrying out its verdict regarding the Sheikh Jarrah evictions and decided to prevent Jews from visiting Temple Mount. The Prime Minister also decided to reroute the Jerusalem Day flag parade to avoid passing through a section of Jerusalem's Old City where Muslim occupants densely populated the area.
The Biden administration's requests appeared similar to that of the Hamas militant group. Newsweek spoke to a Hamas spokesperson, who shared that they too had concerns that need to be addressed by Israel. The Hamas representative who spoke on behalf of the Palestinian Joint Operations Room, an allegiance of several Gaza-based groups including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad said that their goals as a group was "to have the Israeli occupation authorities accept our demands."
The group wanted to provide "free access to worshipers from all parts of Palestine to pray at Al Aqsa Mosque without restriction or harassment by the Israeli police or the Israeli settlers and halting the attempts to expel the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah," the report said. The court case involving the eviction of Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem had resulted in the more violent conflict that caused a 10-day air strike between Israel and Palestine.
An Israeli official denounced Hamas' demands to Israel, saying that they were not "in any position to have demands and in general we do not respond to demands of terrorists." The Hamas militant group was declared by the U.S. as a Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997.
The ceasefire between Israel and Palestine is going on its fourth day, with mediators speaking to both sides following the worst conflict outbreak in years. Now the United Nations and the United States are in talks to send aid to Gaza, where Reuters reports that there "tens of millions of dollars" worth of damage, with 248 dead over the last 11 days of conflict. The United Arab Emirates have also expressed interest in facilitating peace efforts between Israel and Palestine.
